I’m a massive Foo Fighters fan. I dipped my foot in the water about 15 years ago via Napster, and then truly dove in just before One by One was released. This period happened to be the darkest in the band’s history: it was quite possible that I’d become a fan just as they were breaking up.
That wasn’t the case in the end, but the turmoil resulted in that album being axed by Dave Grohl as it was going to print, then re-recorded in piecemeal over two weeks in the spring of 2002 and finally released that October. Of the eleven tracks originally picked, seven tracks—All My Life, Have It All, Halo, Overdrive, Lonely As You, Burn Away, and Come Back—were re-recorded. Tired Of You made it to the final album in its original form; Normal and Walking A Line were used as bonus tracks.
When people talk about the Million Dollar Demos, they’re referring to one of two things: The original sessions, in late 2001 in Virginia and Los Angeles; and those seven original tracks, until a month ago one of the most closely-guarded secrets in rock.
The band didn’t make a big deal about covering up what happened. Numerous interviews make it clear: They recorded for about four months, hated what they made, took a break and redid it all. For the hardcore fan, though, the original sessions represented a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a popular band. They—who am I kidding, we—can’t be blamed for being curious. Because it was so close to print, a lot of the band’s inner circle and management got to hear it, and some even got discs.
I doubt anyone outside of the inner circle expected to hear that album until something peculiar happened. Sony Records, parent of RCA Records and core member of the RIAA, was in full attack mode against music piracy by 2002. One of their strategies was to release dummy copies of new releases onto trading networks, with chunks of silence and white noise, to annoy pirates enough that maybe they’d just give up. So they did for One by One. Problem is…they had a copy of the original sessions. And, being geniuses, they used that one.
For a good decade-plus, then, all we had were snippets of those seven tracks. Come Back was a curious case. It and Lonely As You had been massively re-arranged since the Million Dollar Demos, but unlike Lonely, Come Back had been played live in its original form just once. Someone recorded it. This eventually resulted in this Frankenstein’s monster of rock, a version of the song using the live recording, the final album release, and the chopped-up Demo release to create the closest approximation to the full Demos that anyone could muster.
A couple years ago, out of nowhere, someone killed Frankengrohl’s monster by releasing Come Back in full—and Have It All with it. That was a revelation. Maybe, finally, one of the few who held the hallowed discs were slipping from their solemn oath to never, ever let those shit recordings fall into public hands (or something). But there was still the intensity of Lonely As You, the promise of Halo, and the drive-by curiosity about All My Life there to tease us faithful.
Then, just a month ago, in early August 2015, some guy calling himself Dale Nixon (one of Dave’s old pseudonyms) dumped all seven onto Reddit, and like that an era of searching ended. And I didn’t even hear about it for a week.
One by One is a massively conflicting album for me. The songs hold so much promise, even Burn Away, but the drums sound dead and the mastering exhibits the worst of the Loudness Wars. I always hoped, with these glimpses of the Million Dollar Demos, that in those original recordings some of the life of the drums, lead guitars, and other details lost in the fuzz would be much more evident.
Truth is, they’re not. They all sound like shit. There’s glimpses, yes, like the chimy lead in Halo, but by and large I understand why Dave doesn’t want this out. It’s lifeless. It’s trying too hard to make up for not really giving a damn. All My Life is the biggest indicator of this; hell, just compare the way he enuciates “waste” in the chorus. Million Dollar Demo: Very hard “-te”, thinking way too hard about the next word coming, emphasized by a generally weak vocal intention. Final: Fuck it, I’m gonna sing this like it’s live but my throat’s not shot. And on to the next.
Lonely As You is the most interesting, because while Come Back probably saw the most lyrical alteration, the way the riffs are assembled didn’t change that much in comparison. In Lonely, the lyrics aren’t much different, but Dave’s vocal melody is all up and down the register in the verses without the extreme harmonization that appeared later. The verses were also much more full of instrumentation; the second time around, they were stripped bare. It also had this noodling additional run through the chorus, exhibiting a common problem of not knowing how to end these songs (Have It All’s ending struggles the band talked about publicly). While there are elements of these originals that I think I prefer, it’s now really clear to understand why the band made the changes they made, why the songs ended up how they did, and it’s actually easy for me to say that even if they’re still not the best, they’re better than they almost ended up being.
I find myself shaking my head when I read people saying how much they love these songs, how much better they are than the final. Like…am I not hearing the same thing? They really do sound like shit. I listen to them because, like many hardcore fans, I have this academic fascination with what’s going on in these recordings that you can’t hear, those things that manifest themselves between the waveforms. But give me the final release any day as a proper work of music. I feel Dave’s embarrassment. I wonder if he knows they finally got out. I wonder how he feels about it.